The one and only Gordon Brown

Bagehot in The Economist makes the sensible—but overlooked—point that Brown’s strengths are his weaknesses and vice-versa:

“In his response to the crisis, Mr Brown has demonstrated many of the traits that contributed to his ruination before. One is a fondness for plagiarism. He is a natural copycat, as he demonstrated to his cost last year when he imitated a sketchy Tory idea to ease inheritance tax by squeezing “non-doms”. But well-judged plagiarism can be a desirable, even an admirable, skill in a leader, as it is proving now. Mr Brown borrowed elements of Sweden’s bank-rescue package of 1992, plus ideas advanced by the Tories and others, and worked them into a proposal that he victoriously presented as his own.

Next, Mr Brown’s taste and fitness for austerity. For part of his short premiership, he tried—and failed—to proffer himself as the champion of a different abstract noun: aspiration. But he has always seemed constitutionally inclined to worry more about averting bad things (poverty, inequality and so on) than about making good things happen. His natural political costume is the hair shirt. Along has come a potential catastrophe, the partial aversion of which seems heroic rather than dully worthy.

Finally, Mr Brown finds himself in his natural element in macroeconomic meltdown, just as Tony Blair was in questions of liberal interventionism. He is not expected to emote or empathise or discharge any of the other awkwardly human duties of routine political leadership. Instead he can talk fluently about the lessons of past crises and his suddenly fashionable plans for reforming the global financial architecture. He can revert, in other words, to the staid but commanding persona he honed as chancellor. Another way of putting it is that Mr Brown can sail, for the moment, above ordinary politics. And it is lowly politics—positioning, spinning, over-promising—that got him into trouble.”
 
Bagehot’s conclusion is, I think, spot-on: 

“Circumstances changed, not the prime minister. To prosper after the panic ebbs, he still needs to.”

To use a sporting analogy, Brown reminds me of one of those workhorse English swing bowlers who is devastating in the right conditions but on an unresponsive wicket gets carted around the park. Looking at the medium-term economic prospects, I suspect that the juice will have gone out of the pitch for Brown before the next election.